Transcript caws4 12770
How should we measure cultural change? @Ted_Underwood, UIUC Presented at IPAM, UCLA May 26, 2016 Nonguilty collaborators: Hoyt Long, Richard Jean So, Yuancheng Zhu (Univ. of Chicago). Heuser and Le-Khac, 2012 • ABSTRACT VALUES – – – – moral valuation partiality sentiment social restraint • “HARD SEEDS” – – – – action verbs body parts physical adjectives locative prepositions “Telling” also gives way to “showing,” for instance, in Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921). But Lubbock’s story doesn’t look like this: Objection • The things we can measure in the aggregate may change slowly. But is that literary change? Tentative answer • It’s a fair objection. Arguments about change need to focus on specific literary concepts, and use methods that could capture discontinuity. Just measure distances? “The Evolution of Popular Music” (Mauch et al., 2015) “The Evolution of Popular Music” (Mauch et al., 2015) snippets harmonic and timbral topics Euclidean distances in topic-space “The Evolution of Popular Music” (Mauch et al., 2015) Response: “You say you found a revolution,” collective post on The Stone and the Shell. Why exactly do distances matter? Suppose this axis is, he’ll we’ll she’ll don’t can’t won’t We’re only going to know that a model of change is “literary” if it’s supervised by literary concepts. Not just supervised by date Predictive accuracies of decades against other decades: statistically significant, but slight and uninterpretable variations. 50-yr halfwidth We have to choose a literary concept. Detective fiction, described by three different witnesses • Took form in the 1890s; may really be a sequence of distinct generational phases (Moretti). • Was defined by Poe in the 1840s (Rachman). • “All genres change unceasingly”; crime fiction no longer has anything to do with Poe (Ascari). A casual sample of features • DETECTIVE murder police investigation door found facts • NOT their taught live grow education children Measuring change as “model decay” 1940s as seen by itself 1940s as predicted by a model of 18301930 Label A Label A Label B Label B lost accuracy Trained up to 1930, predicting beyond 1930: (post-1930 model goes from 88.5% to 86.9% accurate). The Life Cycles of Genres • http://culturalanalytics.org/ • No evidence for Moretti’s generational conjecture. • Science fiction consolidated before the pulps are supposed to have consolidated it. Mary Shelley fits a 20c mold. • “The Gothic” lacks much textual coherence outside the late 18c / early 19c. Anywhere you can supervise a model: • patterns of literary prestige / market success • social boundaries inside the fictional world • social identities of authors • maybe word vectors? Assumptions about supervised models • They can only confirm existing categories. • They can fail to find predicted continuities, or find them where not expected. • The point is maximum accuracy. • The point is to ground results in a disciplinary conversation. Low accuracy can be informative. So, in conclusion … But wait! Model decay is asymmetric! Fiction and biography become easier and easier to divide Ann Radcliffe Mysteries of Udolpho Henry Fielding Tom Jones Ernest Hemingway The Hemingway Reader Roy Friedman The Insurrection of Hippolytus Brandenburg Btw, related to Heuser & Le-Khac 2012. Fiction and biography become easier and easier to divide Ann Radcliffe Mysteries of Udolpho Henry Fielding Tom Jones Ernest Hemingway The Hemingway Reader Roy Friedman The Insurrection of Hippolytus Brandenburg Because one end of the timeline is harder to classify, models decay asymmetrically.